


Honesty Hour

by AnnetheCatDetective



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Canadian Shack, Love Confessions, M/M, protective Monroe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24204145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: After things take an unexpected turn while accompanying Nick on the job, Monroe has to take care of an injured Grimm while holing up in someone's abandoned one-room cabin in the woods. Which he can totally deal with, really. He's an adult and he can deal with his feelings like one.Okay, so maybe he accidentally lets a lot of those feelings come out. But in his defense, he thought Nick was sleeping...
Relationships: Nick Burkhardt/Monroe
Comments: 12
Kudos: 197
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	Honesty Hour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalika_999](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalika_999/gifts).



It wasn’t even a Wesen thing, that’s what gets to him the most. It was, like… drugs. Nick got _shot_. Nick got shot, Monroe Woged out and tore the arm off a guy on PCP-- which is probably fine, because what’s going to happen? Three remaining guys on PCP are going to go to the cops crying about a wolfman in the woods?

And then Monroe picked Nick up and carried him-- through highly inclement weather, mind, but it’s Portland, if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes-- to the nearest cabin, and hammered on the door, and the door swung open, and…

It’s just a hell of a day.

Monroe rips the dustcloth off a chair, sets Nick down in it. He’s looking… not great. Well, he’s soaked to the bone and he’s been shot, the smell of the blood is overwhelming, but Monroe keeps himself clear-headed, as clear-headed as he can. He’s still in full blutbad mode, which is… It’s just how it’s going to be, for right now.

Normally, he is very much not. He doesn’t enjoy it, and he always gets the feeling like maybe it’s… better, not to be. Not that he doesn’t trust Nick to remember he’s a good guy, but it feels uncomfortable, somehow. Right now, though, his blood is up, he’d needed all the extra strength he could summon to carry an injured Nick, and he…

He doesn’t know. 

It’s not like they haven’t gotten into trouble together before, so why is this time so different? Why can’t he calm down? The danger’s past, or it will be once he gets Nick patched up and finds a way to get some real help. But Monroe is barely holding it together. Normally, he wouldn’t think being Woged would work in his favor, where emotional control is concerned-- this side of him isn’t exactly cool, calm and collected. But, this side of him might be keyed into a lot of primal emotions-- fear’s not usually one of them. And if he lets himself be overwhelmed by fear now, he’s no good to Nick. And protecting Nick is all that matters.

Protecting Nick? Is _primal_.

One shot just grazed Nick’s arm, once he gets him stripped to the waist, he can deal with that, can tear bandages out of Nick’s undershirt. They’ll worry about proper wound care later, this is emergency stuff. Stop the bleeding, stop the freezing.

The shot that hit his thigh is going to be a bigger problem, but Nick is alert enough and strong enough to press Monroe’s shirt to it to stem the bleeding for the time being-- though he makes it clear he’s not happy with the situation even as he does so. Grimms are made of sterner stuff, he’ll give him that. He’s able to snark about the level of care he’s going to receive while holed up in a shack, so he’ll probably be fine. It doesn’t stop Monroe from worrying over him.

“I’ll fix it in a minute.” He promises. “Nick? I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Nick gives him a pained and slightly woozy smile. He took a few lumps before gunplay came into things, but Monroe just reminds himself it’s nothing a Grimm can’t shake off. He’ll heal fast, once Monroe can take care of him. Most of the job of taking care of Nick he thinks he needs to look a little more human to do-- the claws get in the way. But he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it, he’ll deal with the weird new stranglehold fear seems to have on him this time. He’ll protec-- _take care of_ \-- Nick. No matter what.

He sets about building a fire, then he starts tearing apart the drawers and cupboards-- the cabin had been left unlocked and clearly long-unoccupied, but it’s furnished, and there are some things. A first aid kit, thankfully. A rubbermaid container in a linen closet, keeping sheets and towels free from dust and spiders. Kitchen junk, flashlights, a radio… if he has time, he can do a fuller inventory-- and, yes, fix everything he’s messed up, which Nick clearly wants him to do, based on the groans he’d let out whenever Monroe had tossed something around. For now, he has tasks.

Totally human-shaped non-Woged-out tasks, like getting the bed made up, like getting all their remaining clothes hung up by the fire, like getting alcohol and real bandages… he considers using the fire to sterilize his pocketknife to try and dig the bullet out, but he’s aware he could do more harm than good that way-- they’ll remove it properly in the hospital, after help arrives. He gets the water running, until it runs clear and hot, he washes and then fills a bowl, carries Nick to the bed and then the towels, the steaming water, the first aid kit. He does his best.

Nick’s in agony, but that’s just… that can’t be helped. Monroe gets him taken care of and trusts Nick’s Grimm abilities will help when it comes to stopping the bleeding. Nothing vital hit, at least. 

One problem, once he’s considerably less hairy, he is really feeling his own near-nudity in a whole new way. He’s stripped them both down to their reasonably dry underwear for now. The cabin is, mercifully, one room. The fire heats it all well enough, means they’ll warm up fine, they’ll… they’ll be okay. Nick will be okay, Monroe reminds himself, not for the first or the last time. Monroe will be okay so long as Nick is okay. Monroe didn’t get himself _shot_.

And he ripped off the gun arm of the man who shot Nick.

He’s not supposed to be proud of that. He’s a little sick with himself, but he’s also a little proud. That he did that for Nick-- not to avenge him, which might be a bit much, but to keep the next shot from hitting something he couldn’t shake off.

It’s difficult to think about the ways in which he wants Nick to acknowledge what he’s done. 

It’s difficult to think, period, to be fair. It’s difficult to think because he’s slid into bed with Nick to share body heat, while waiting on the fire to sufficiently get the place heated, to speed up the building of warmth beneath the covers. It’s difficult to think because Monroe is very carefully holding Nick in his arms, Nick’s back to his front, Nick’s bad leg and arm supported, Monroe rubbing his chest to try and banish the chill from his skin as quickly as possible, and the both of them so close to naked. 

What’s different… what’s different is that Nick is normally fighting Wesen and not getting shot at by gangs on PCP. At least when Monroe is around.

What’s different is that Nick used to be with Juliette and now he’s not.

What’s different is not important, what’s important is that Monroe take _care_ of him.

Nick drifts off into an exhausted slumber, but it seems like much-needed sleep, not passing out, and the scent of blood is at a level where he can’t be losing too much. When the cabin seems warm enough, Monroe leaves the bed and sets to tidying the cabin. The least he could do for making such a mess of the place, and… and Nick will handle being holed up easier, if the place is nicer. 

And he would rather receive Nick’s gratitude and praise for cleaning up after them than for ripping a guy’s arm off, honestly. 

Not, like… ‘good boy’ praise, which would be quite frankly insulting, but… like, maybe just a little ‘what would I do without you’, maybe a little ‘Monroe, you take such good care of things’, and okay, okay, _maybe_ some ‘Monroe, you take such good care of _me_ ’, because, honesty hour, he’d kind of be into that. He’d kind of be into Nick needing him-- or, not needing him, exactly, but really, really appreciating that he has him.

Real honesty hour, he’s more than kind of into Nick.

At first maybe there was a little of that forbidden fruit angle. A Grimm? Couldn’t get more taboo than that, and sure, sometimes taboo is sexy. Even without the Grimm thing, if Nick had been another blutbad, there’d be a little bit of that-- assuming the same difference in strength between them. Monroe’s not the type of guy to get hung up on that, but it’s a whole thing. He happens to be stronger than a lot of people, whether or not it matters to him. It matters to other guys-- it matters to blutbad guys, to be specific, like the kind of guys who he would have wanted to go with, when he was young, but the whole problem with trying to date other guys, when you’re young and rough around the edges and a blutbad, and the guys you are hanging out with are the same, is that everyone’s got hangups about being stronger than the guy they’re with and it all gets messy, and with maturity comes acceptance and growth and all, but with bisexuality comes the option to just not deal with it. Monroe had gotten sick of posturing, and he'd gotten sick of guys pouting if he showed them up, and back then he hadn't yet learned how to just not care about all that stuff, and how stupid it really was... Like, now he's got a lecture locked and loaded about how bullshit the idea of the alpha male is, but he also blew his chances with the guy who could have been his first real boyfriend because they both got stupid competitive trying to show off to each other, which led to some really great making out but also led to their breaking up over arm-wrestling of all things. So after that, he mostly got serious with women, and he ignored the times he felt a tug towards the wrong kind of guy because he had enough trouble always chasing after the wrong kind of girl.

The guys he knows who are into other guys, they all got over that stuff, somewhere between wild youth and respectable adulthood. At least, he assumes they have because they’ve all got partners, and what he’s got is not a lot of experience when it comes to dating guys. And he always thought he'd stopped caring about a lot of things, but he’s realizing that he does, just… in a different way.

Like, he’s into the fact that Nick is stronger than he is, but it’s not because he wants Nick to take control and dominate him-- which is another taboo that he guesses some guys might be into, and maybe figuring out and accepting that you're into that makes relationships easier for some. Certainly learning not to give a shit makes it easier for others. No, it’s that he wants Nick to be stronger than him and to ask him to take charge anyway. Not in a rough stuff way, but… 

He doesn’t know. For Nick to want Monroe to take care of him, even though he doesn’t need that. For Nick to want Monroe protecting him, and providing for him. For Nick to look at Monroe and… what? Love him? 

_Yeah_ , actually, love him. That’s what he wants. And for Nick to not be hung up on strength and power and the ‘natural order’ of things with Grimms and Wesen, for Nick to just feel safer with him than without him, and for the two of them…

Technically he doesn’t _know_ if Nick is even bi, but he kind of feels like he knows. Not that it’s any kind of guarantee Nick would want to be with _him_ , because when you take away the Grimm/Wesen taboo, what you're left with is a dorky vegetarian clockmaker who doesn't know how to talk to people or dress or-- well, who's like the less cool version of basically every guy in Portland, honestly. Maybe it has to be enough to remember that Nick does feel safer with Monroe around than without him-- at least, when he’s got to track down something dangerous.

Which, this time, didn’t even turn out to be Wesen, just guys so drugged out that they ignored the limits of their very human bodies, so Monroe can't blame Nick for looking at the description and thinking Wesen problems. But whatever, he still… Nick still needed him and he still came through, and Nick is stirring in bed, soft noises a human wouldn’t hear from across the room but which Monroe does, and the cabin is as tidy as it’s going to get, considering he’d ripped two cupboard doors off their hinges and he hasn’t got the tools to fix that right now.

He can find the place again, maybe also fix the front door, re-stock the first aid kit. Leave a note?

For now, he returns to the bed.

“Shh, it’s okay.” He whispers-- slides under the covers but doesn’t spoon up behind Nick this time. “Everything’s fine. Just rest.”

Nick’s not awake, not really-- just distressed, half in and half out of sleep. Monroe can’t do a whole lot for him beyond what he has done, so he talks. First, about where they are, about how he’ll fix everything he might have broken, about how there’s no phone but he’ll figure something out, or once the sleet and rain let up he can go out and find a signal. And then just about anything he can think about that isn’t too interesting. He talks about work and routine plans, a book about railroad lines of the Columbia River Gorge that he’d been reading, and Nick’s breathing evens right out. Just to be safe, he goes a little longer, talks about a lentil-based sausage he thought turned out really well, watches Nick at peace. He settles back down to just watch the back of Nick's head at peace, and even just looking at the back of Nick's head, the feeling overwhelms him.

“You should come over, actually.” He says, waits to see if Nick will react. He doesn’t. “For the lentil sausage. I mean, or just-- when you get fixed up and they let you go, we’ll get together and celebrate a job well done, I’ll make pasta with lentil sausage, if you’re not on the heavy pain meds we’ll have a couple of drinks, we’ll… Maybe we’ll sit outside, under the stars, with a couple of drinks, and maybe I’ll work up the nerve to tell you how I feel about you. That’d be a laugh, huh? Hey, Nick, turns out I’m kind of in love with you and I have been for a little while, which is still longer than you’d expect. I mean you wouldn’t expect it at all, that’s… that’s I guess the funny part. I know, I know, you wouldn’t know to look at me. Guys? I mean, both, you know enough about my not-so-stellar dating history. There’s a conversation starter for you; Hey, Nick, know how we both have a weakness for beautiful redheads? Well it turns out I also have a weakness for guys who could kick my ass. I mean, who _wouldn’t_ , but who could. The not-kicking-my-ass part is important. With big blue eyes, like… unfairly pretty eyes. Unfairly pretty guys. The badge doesn’t do it for me in general, but if it’s you it’s okay. Hey, Nick, it turns out I think about you a lot, it turns out I have literal dreams about feeding you my sausage, and that’s not just a crude metaphor. It turns out all I want in all the world is to hold you in my arms and know you’re safe because of me.”

“So why don’t you?” Nick mumbles.

Monroe’s soul leaves his body, just a little bit. If he didn’t still have to get Nick to actual safety and medical care, he might just go towards the light here and now.

“Monroe?” Nick prompts. 

“How much of that did you hear?”

“I don’t know, it’s fuzzy, I missed the first part of what you were saying. I tuned in somewhere around the train stuff?”

“Dude, the train stuff was supposed to put you to sleep! Or… keep you asleep!”

“Mm. More of a… light, relaxing trance.”

“So you caught _all_ of that, the, the personal stuff?”

“Like that you think my eyes are pretty?”

“I’m going to go see if our clothes are dry yet, I gotta-- I gotta find a signal so I can call for someone to come get you out of here and get that bullet out of your leg, and--”

“Monroe.” Nick’s voice allows for little argument, despite the weakness in it-- less that Nick could really stop him, at present, more that Monroe would fall over himself to make Nick happy, even if it means shutting up and letting him say whatever he needs to say, whether or not it’s likely to be completely devastating. “Monroe, I am safe because of you.”

“... Oh.” Well that wasn’t devastating. That was-- that felt _good_.

“And I’d like that.” He sighs. “Dinner. Sitting out under the stars. I’m not sold on the idea of lentil sausage, but I’m willing to give it a try. I like _you_.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah. Go figure, I’m kind of into your whole thing.”

Monroe moves a little closer, carefully slides an arm around Nick. Gives in and buries his nose against the back of Nick’s neck to breathe him in. “My whole thing?”

“Yeah. The big not-so-bad wolf.” He chuckles, lacing their fingers together. “And the clocks and the trains and the sweaters and the flannel. And the beard. That one surprised me.”

“Huh.”

“Kind of surprising me right now, but I like how it feels. And, uh, I like how _this_ feels. I like being the little spoon with someone. Which is… Which I don’t get a lot of. Like… I always have to be-- you know? But I like how I feel with you. Bullet holes aside.”

“Yeah, I could do without those.” He kisses Nick’s shoulder, feels a bright warmth take him when Nick shifts in his arms to press closer. “I’ll call for help once the rain lets up. Get those holes patched up. Nick… I want to take care of you.”

“ _Good_.”

There’s more he maybe needs to say-- that ‘want’ is too weak a word for it, that there is something primal in the way he has to protect him and has to love him, but it’s not a frightening kind of primal, or it doesn’t have to be. Frightening, in that he doesn’t know what he’d do if something really serious happened to Nick, in that he doesn’t know how he’d exist without him now that he’s held him, now that he’s kissed his skin and shared a bed with him and been granted permission to love him, but…

He’ll deal, they’ll deal. They’ll figure themselves out, but if Nick wants to be with him, well… he can’t help but feel good about that.


End file.
